Unicode 16: Symbols for Legacy Computing Supplement [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Unicode 16: Symbols for Legacy Computing Supplement [pdf]

unicode.org

19 pointstosh15 comments

I'm personally shocked at all the negativity in the comments so far about this.

As someone who is terrible at creating graphics, I love the breadth of what is available in Unicode. Plus, these Unicode graphics allow for creative, beautiful, and fun terminal apps to be created that are in the spirit of the hacker ethos.

I don't understand why these are part of Unicode. Were they ever used as part of text? Why Pac-man but no Donkey Kong? What is the logical basis for this set?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbols_for_Legacy_Computing#H...

Specifically https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19025-terminals-prop.pdf covering, among others, all the teletext characters.

Let me be more specific: I don't understand why pac-man and fragments of chess pieces and race cars or alienate--essentially all of these sections of "game sprites", which is what jumped out at me as they dominate the first page of this proposal--are being included in Unicode. I do understand why the various block drawing characters used in teletext schemes should be included.

Because they provide a round-trip compatibility with those character sets, which have been one of the defining goals of Unicode from the very beginning. The same reason that various ornaments and dingbats and even emojis did end up in the Unicode.

I'm actually surprised that the TeleText ones weren't already in Unicode, as TeleText is still live and in use in many parts of Europe[0], so being able to encode those in modern software is still relevant if you want to produce, edit or archive tele-text content.

[0] e.g. Sweden https://www.svt.se/text-tv/100 https://www.svt.se/text-tv/401

The terminal graphics characters seem useful, not just for emulating vintage terminals and PCs but also in "modern" terminal windows and TUIs.

Though I'd also like to see more terminal emulator programs with integrated graphics support.

I want to see better support for non-Unicode character sets in terminal emulators.

For all those groups-of-4 pacmans symbols wouldn't it be better to have a single pacman and a rotation angle adjustment? (then you also wouldn't be limited to just 4)

Unicode in general doesn't like encoding arbitrary markup unless absolutely necessary. And for historical character sets the scope is limited and finite, so just using four code points is much easier than trying to specify a higher-order meaning for certain sequences of code points. Unicode also doesn't like encoding things based on hypothetical future use.

I was part of Unicode effort it’s inception at Xerox and then Apple. It has drifted so far from the initial core principles (that happened a very long time ago) that I find Unicode as a whole a technical embarrassment. Seeing yet another duplicate range of latin characters that are just a font variation sickens me to my core even forgetting all the other issues with this range. This is exactly the kind of standard that exemplifies the problems in designing by committee. There are no true guiding principles.

I agree - considering Han unification, what justifies the existence of the segmented digits or the outline uppercase characters? (Or traditional vs simplified Chinese characters, etc etc etc…)

we'll be integrating these into Notcurses soon!

Oh my god, do we need yet another slightly differently looking font for the basic Latin alphabet in the Unicode? I guess I can use them for the keywords in my next world-disrupting programming language, but still: don't we have like, at least 8 fancy fonts already? Could we get at least a second Greek alphabet instead, pretty please?

The symbols for electronic circuits and sprites are fine though. I particularly appreciate the right-facing fish with open mouth.

NFKC (Compatibility Decomposition, followed by Canonical Composition) has been my go-to for this, due to this exact issue that was messing with the normal NFC. Twitter of all places was using some other bizarre Unicode range for bold characters.

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